They and their baby continued to encumber the apartment for a year or two before the old people died—of weariness perhaps, perhaps of old age—or grief—or some similar disease so fatal to the aged. Anyway, they died, and there remained nothing in the estate not subject to creditors. And, as tinted photographs had gone out of fashion even in Utica, and as the advent of moving pictures was beginning to kill vaudeville everywhere except in New York, the ever-provincial, thither the Quest family drifted. And there, through the next few years, they sifted downward through stratum after stratum of the metropolitan purlieus, always toward some darker substratum—always a little lower. The childishly attractive mother, in blue velvet and white cat’s fur, still did fancy skating at rink and Hippodrome. The father sometimes sat dazed and coughing in the chilly waiting rooms of theatrical agencies. Fortified by drugs and by a shabby fur overcoat, he sometimes managed to make the rounds in pleasant weather; and continued to die rather slowly, considering his physical condition. But his father, who had so long ago disowned him—the Reverend Anthony Quest—being in perfect moral condition, caught a slight cold in his large, warm library, and died of pneumonia in forty-eight hours—a frightful example of earthly injustice, doubtless made all right in Heaven. Young Quest, forbidden the presence for years, came skulking around after a while with a Jew lawyer, only to find that his one living relative, a predatory aunt, had assimilated everything and was perfectly qualified to keep it under the terms of his father’s will. Her attorneys made short work of the shyster. She herself, many times a victim to her nephew’s deceit in former years, and once having stood between him and prison concerning the matter of a signature for thousands of dollars—the said signature not being hers but by her recognised for the miserable young man’s sake—this formidable and acidulous old lady wrote to her nephew in reply to a letter of his: You always were a liar. I do not believe you are married. I do not believe you have a baby. I send you—not a cheque, because you’d probably raise it—but enough money to start you properly. Keep away from me. You are what you are partly through your father’s failure to do his duty by you. An optimist taken at birth and patiently trained can be saved. Nobody saved you; you were merely punished. And you, naturally, became a swindler. But I can’t help that now. It’s too late. I can only send you money. And if it’s true you have a child, for God’s sake take her in time or she’ll turn into what you are. And _that_ is why I send you any money at all—on the remote chance that you are not lying. Keep away from me, Harry. ROSALINDA QUEST. So he did not trouble her, he knew her of old; and besides he was too ill, too dazed with drugs to bother with such things. He lost every penny of the money in Quint’s gambling house within a month.